Effects of volume scaling in AlN nano plate resonators on quality factor

This paper reports on the experimental study of the effects of volume scaling in aluminum nitride (AlN) nano plate resonators on quality factor. For the first time, we show that efficient piezoelectric transduction of a high frequency (~ 1 GHz) lateral-extensional mode of vibration and a high quality factor approaching 900 can be achieved when the thickness of the AlN nano plate is scaled from 200 nm to 50 nm. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate that the greatly reduced thickness of the AlN plate enables the scaling of device area down to 32×28 μm2. We show that such aggressive scaling of the device lateral dimensions yields higher quality factor when the thickness of the resonator is scaled to 50 nm. In addition, we experimentally demonstrate that the deposition of such ultrathin AlN film on a plane (not patterned) bottom electrode is desirable for the implementation of resonators with high quality factors.